Yannick Haenel > Quotes

“At the entrance to the restaurant, laid out on a bed of ice, there were oysters that were making me hungry. Their shells sparkled, like little lights stuck on a cliff. Mother-of-pearl encourages sparkling. It is said that an oyster secretes a pearl from where it was hurt. And so the wound is desirable, it greets the zest of the lemon that, while I am writing these lines, is making my mouth water. I am going to drink at those lacy edges, I am going to suck down the pearl. Yes, a watering mouth, everything comes from that, the world exists only to create desire.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“I wasn’t really impressed with society’s idea of literature. What does it know about it? Nothing. Everyone thinks they know what literature is, but no one knows anything.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Le langage et l’être aimé sont pour moi une même chose. Le texte écrit et l’amour s’entrelacent, ils coïncident. « Cercle », c’est ce que je nomme l’amour. Le livre ne « contient » pas une histoire d’amour — il est l’amour.”
― Yannick Haenel, Cercle

“If you say the name of a dead person, it is metamorphosed into sparks and joins the sparkling others that populate the world.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“When you have written something you think is important, even if it’s only three lines, those lines continue to live through your thoughts, and without your knowing it, they transmit their discoveries to you. It sometimes seems to me that it is they, on a very secret level, that live instead of us, thereby sparing us the trouble of finding a solution to our lives: the lines exist; as for us, we don’t matter.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“an indecipherable truth: the gods who make fun of themselves are the most powerful.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“While biting into the flesh of an oyster, I felt myself losing it. I had drunk a lot, but it wasn’t the wine that was making my head spin. In seeking the life that leads to absolute space, I get drunk. But I always stay on the edge of the mystery. No, this evening I was losing it out of pleasure because the flesh of the oyster is a delicacy that makes you shiver. You might say it is the treasures of the mother-of-pearl sparkling on your tongue. And that oyster, which the waitress had told me was a grand cru from Normandy, melted in my mouth like a dissolving sea jewel. Eating oysters is a sacramental act, I told Pointel, who grunted. He swore only by the lobster.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Five months later, I received a text from Pointel. It was September 23. I remember it distinctly because it was my birthday. I was in the middle of celebrating the event as was appropriate, by drinking a six-pack of beer in bed watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, when the message appeared on my phone.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Screenplays are the death of writers, they said. The moment a writer starts to dream about making a film is precisely the moment that marks his death as a writer. The signal of his impending ruin—for a writer, financial ruin, and above all moral, psychic, and mental ruin—is when he gets it into his head to write a screenplay.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“The lines you repeat are like prayers thrown against a wall. You think they’ll break, but it turns out they break through the wall, it turns out the visible reaches the invisible—and they coincide.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Sometimes at night the devil is sleeping on my lips. If I open my mouth, he starts nibbling on my teeth. If I don’t react, he will swallow my tongue. I must as quickly as possible find a word, the right word, the one that disarms the evil, the one that cuts through the darkness and offers clarity again.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“We must continue to move toward the light, even when it is completely extinguished, because darkness takes advantage of our slightest distractions. It wants to live in our place, and when it achieves this, it drives us out.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Knights have their armor, I have my coat. When I wear it, I am protected. Inside it there is my notebook, one or two books, and something to write with. There’s my phone, a few lucky charms, and a flask of vodka, everything I need to survive. I like knowing that I have the essential on me, that I can last a long time, anywhere, without asking anyone for anything. And, in case things take a turn for the worse, it’s good to be able to leave right away, without going to the coat check.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“Guy the Cobra had also taken part in events. And then solitude had ultimately seemed more important to him. In the end, he told me, the only true politics consists in keeping one’s soul, and even more simply, in having a soul.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“When you act against your own interests (when you sabotage yourself), it is always out of loyalty to something more obscure which you secretly know is right. After all, what is most precious is as difficult to attain as it is rare.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“If a new god settled down somewhere on earth, and if he sent letters in his name to be disseminated among humans, they would be found between the legs of a woman and the antlers of a deer.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“For most people, death doesn’t exist, they lose friends, they lose a parent, they suffer from that, but their own demise remains distant. Nothing in the world can get them to visit their own grave. They close their eyes while the knife slowly pierces their heart.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed. Did I dream of Cimino, New York, the Statue of Liberty? Did I really see those films where the deer were offering me their heads? And Tot, Anouk, Pointel, Isabelle Huppert—do they really exist?”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown

“I think that something even more obscure, more timeless, occurs which comes out of the trafficking between men and the gods, that is, from the madness of tales.”
― Yannick Haenel, Hold Fast Your Crown